


Have a Little Mercy

by charleybradburies



Series: Angela Montenegro Appreciation Week 2015 [1]
Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Children, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Arguing, Brother-Sister Relationships, Bullying, Canon Queer Character, Canon Related, Childhood Friends, Childhood Sweethearts, Children, Community: 1_million_words, Cookies, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Relationships, Female-Centric, First Meetings, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, One Shot Collection, POV Female Character, Playgrounds, Pre-Relationship, Sibling Rivalry, Siblings, Summer Camp, Teacher-Student Relationship, Tumblr Prompt, Tumblr: otpprompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:53:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3682239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charleybradburies/pseuds/charleybradburies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><div class="center">
  <p>ANGELA WEEK PROMPT: DAY ONE: WHY YOU LOVE HER</p>
  <hr/>
  <p>"Have Mercy - love me like there ain't no choice."</p>
  <hr/>
  <p>This is a one shot about the Actual Angel℠ Angela Montenegro being another girl's guardian angel.</p>
  <hr/>
  <p>"She is personally someone I wish I had in my life. A shining beacon of love and hope. Never fading."<br/>-Tumblr's fabulous <a href="http://michaelaconlin.tumblr.com/post/115515029679/angela-montenegro-appreciation-week-day-1-why">michaelaconlin</a><br/></p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	Have a Little Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> A) Is there seriously not a relationship tag for Angela and her father? And the relationship tag for Bones and Russ is as a pairing? What's up with that?
> 
> Ba) Written for the first day of [Angela Montenegro Appreciation Week 2015.](http://angelaweek2015.tumblr.com) Combined with an OTPPrompts prompt because it fit way too well not to (the original idea I'd come up with to write for this was nearly the same as the prompt).
> 
> Bb) On the Angela Week Prompt: My first reaction was "How could I ever pick a reason?" but I made myself think about it more and I realized that even many things about her that I might categorize as separate reasons come down to one major facet: her compassion. Her unrelenting belief in the good of humanity, of humans, of destiny. Her undying love for love itself. Her selflessness. Her pure, soulful passion...I could go on, but my author's note would end up longer than my fic, so I won't.
> 
> Bc) The OTPPrompts Prompt: Imagine your OTP as little kids. Person A falls off the monkey bars and ends up crying. Person B sees this and tries to cheer them up by generously offering them some cookies (Or another tasty snack if you prefer). They become quick friends.
> 
> Ca) This work's title (as the titles of all this week's works will be) is that of a ZZ Top song, because of the importance of art in Angela's story and her father brilliantly being Billy Gibbons. 
> 
> Cb) This song was chosen because I decided to use the names Mercy and Francine as Angela's birth name which, aside from bearing relevance and meaning, allows for me to chuckle softly at the pun made by "Little" Angela being "Mercy" as she is showing her innate mercifulness. The quote in the summary is also from that song. "La Futura", the album it's on, was released in 2012, but shhh. It works. 
> 
> Cc) It was a little awkward writing a fic about Angela without actually using the name Angela, so I apologize if it feels awkward reading it. 
> 
> Cc) "Francine" is the name of a ZZ Top song as well, from "Rio Grande Mud" which was released in '72.
> 
> E) By the time this is set, the Keenan/Brennan family has already changed names, since they changed when Russ was seven and Bones was three, in '79. I've worked with a lot of kids in that age range (three to seven, that is - I didn't know anyone born in the seventies when they were children, lmao), and it didn't make sense to try to make this plot work with them younger than that. We have their canon years of birth: Angela, (April! 16) of '78; Bones, '76; and Russ in '72; I don't set a year for this, but all things considered, it's probably '85 or '86.
> 
> F) S/O to michaelaconlin for Angela Week. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! As always, comments, kudos, other suggestions, etc., are accepted with gratitude and open arms! xx

“You remember to be nice to Miss Rochester and errybody, right, darlin’?” he kneels down to coo at her, looking her in the eye as though he needed to remind her to be nice. Dads were weird like that. 

“Of _course,_ Daddy,” Mercy reassures him, and leans forward on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. He pulls her into a tight hug and kisses her back, and slips the tote bag onto her shoulder. It’s big and heavy, but she’s a big girl, and she can handle it.

Unfortunately, she’s still a kid, so she still has to follow a ton of rules, even more than just the camp rules, and her father always makes sure to remind her of them when he’s leaving her somewhere, so she stands and listens until he’s done. She knew all of them already, since they didn’t change, but telling her seemed to make him feel better. For a rockstar, he really was a pretty uptight guy, but at least he was here. She had a friend whose daddy wasn’t, and Mercy preferred having her daddy around, even if he was a bit intimidating sometimes. 

He gives her another little kiss on her nose when he’s done reciting the rules, and stands up, smiling at her. 

“Bye, Daddy,” she says.

“Bye, babydoll,” he replies, and puts his sunglasses back on, which is her cue to run off to the other side of the playground. Miss Rochester is talking to somebody’s mom, so Mercy gives a gentle tug to the skirt of her dress, says “excuse me,” and waits for the few seconds it takes the counselor to pause that conversation and look down at her. 

“Good morning, Miss Gibbons,” she says sweetly. Miss Rochester said everything sweetly. Mercy liked that about her.

“Good morning, Miss Rochester. I just wanted to tell you that I’m here.”

“Thank you very much, dear.”

Miss Rochester strokes Mercy’s hair for a moment, and then sends her off to play. She goes over to the big tree next to the playground and plops her bag down. Her dad put a towel in the bag today because he didn’t want her getting grass stains on everything, so she puts it down over the roots of the tree, where she usually sits.

Dana and Jason are racing each other at climbing up the slides, and Mercy whistles and waves at them and they take a break to run over to her. After their shared hugs, they ask her to be the judge, and she pulls herself by the spiral ladder and sits at the platform at the top of the slides. Dana makes it up after a few minutes, and Jason makes it more than half up before he starts to slip down again, and Mercy lays down on her stomach and puts a hand out to help him up the rest of the way. He’s not happy to have lost their competition, but that’s all but forgotten when Mercy announces that she brought cookies. 

The trio rushes back over to Mercy’s tree, and she pulls the Tupperware container out of her bag. She pulls out a cookie for each of them, and they talk about their weekends until Dana and Jason finish theirs and go back to the playground. 

Mercy takes out a juice box and the fancy drawing pad and colored pencils her daddy’d gotten her last Christmas, and leans back up against the tree. She’s only just decided to try to draw Miss Rochester in her pretty yellow dress - the color was a nice contrast to her dark skin, and her pouffy hair was always fun to draw with the sun behind it - when she hears somebody crying. 

They’re hard to find at first, since she can’t see that any of their camp group has gotten hurt, but a close scan of the playground reveals a boy and girl on the monkey bars arguing, a couple other boys around them. The girl is littler than the boy, and she’s dangling by her hands in the middle of the monkey bars, but the boys have climbed on top of them.

“Russ!” the girl screams, and she sounds scared.

“Russ, help me!” 

“I _told_ you you couldn’t do it, see?” one of the boys taunts.

“I could do it if you helped me!”

“Well, then it wouldn’t be _you_ doing it, would it, Tempe?”

The girl tries to kick her legs up, and for a moment Mercy isn’t sure whether she’s trying to pull herself up or kick his butt, but she hopes both.

“I _told_ you to stop trying to play with _me_ and _my_ friends!” 

Totally siblings. Mercy was so glad she didn’t have any, especially at times like this. 

“Russ!” the girl cries again, and all the boys are laughing as they scoot to the edge and hop off the monkey bars, leaving her hanging there, swinging her legs around. Mercy’s daddy would have called some of what he said “choice” words, but Mercy didn’t need any bad words to know that they were being real jerks. 

“Get your _own_ friends, Tempe,” the boy the girl called Russ says, in a voice that’s totally more serious and self-righteous than it should be.

Jerk.

The boys rush off to play somewhere else, and although she keeps struggling - with a look of such fierce concentration that Mercy can see it from her tree even though the monkey bars are on the other side of the playground - the girl’s hands slip from the bars a couple of moments later. She’s able to land well enough that her feet and hands catch her fall a bit, rather than just landing on her tailbone, which was good. Mercy had fallen too many times not to know it hurt something bad, but then again, so does landing on woodchips, no matter what part of your body hit the ground first. 

The girl scoots out from under the monkey bars over to the wooden barrier that marks its edge and the soccer field’s beginning, wincing quite a bit, and pulls her legs into her chest to curl herself into a ball so that when she starts crying a couple seconds later, like she’d been holding it in a while, it’s not quite so noticeable. But Mercy can always tell when someone’s crying. It took skill, and that was the sort of skill she had. She was a very skilled person already. Even her daddy’s bandmates knew that well enough to point it out sometimes, and they were very very skilled at certain things, so obviously they knew a lot about being skilled.

She puts the top back on the Tupperware container and closes her drawing pad. Miss Rochester’s yellow dress would have to wait. Today, she’s found a more important job to do.

She’s skilled at speed-walking, too, so even though one of her daddy’s rules was that she wasn’t supposed to run on the woodchips, she makes it past the monkey bars pretty quick, and she carefully takes a seat near the other girl, setting the Tupperware container in between them. The girl keeps her head bowed, but she turns it just enough to see the cookies and then Mercy, and Mercy makes sure to give her one of her nicest smiles - she totally needed it. 

“Thought a little cheering up was in order,” she says, since the girl looks a bit confused.

“We haven’t even met,” the girl ponders in response, lifting her head up and wiping away some of her tears. 

“Is that a requirement for snacks?”

“Well, cause and effect. People do things that they have motivation to do. People take care of the people they know they care about, that care about them.” 

“I’ll have you know, I have enough caring inside me to care about _everybody._ Especially people who look like they need somebody to care about them.”

The girl continues wiping away her tears, and the kneading of the sleeves of her cardigan against her cheeks starts to make her cheeks redder. She still doesn’t seem to understand that Mercy’s trying to make her feel better.

_Hmm._

“But, here,” Mercy says, angling herself toward the girl and putting her hand out. “If we need to know each other for me to care about you, then we’re friends now. I’m Mercy.”

“Mercy?” the girl asks, smiling a little bit, and Mercy isn’t sure why but that’s okay - a smile was a smile, right?

“Yeah. Well, my full name is Mercy Francine Gibbons, but just about nobody actually goes by their full name, and I’m just called Mercy.”

The girl accepts Mercy’s handshake. 

“I’m Temperance. Most people just call me Tempe, though.”

“Nice to meet you, Tempe. Now that we know each other, have a cookie. They're oatmeal raisin, and they're the best.”


End file.
